Hospital trust accused of fiddling A&E wait time figures

A trust where a woman died after a 35 hour wait on a trolley has been accused of fiddling previous Accident & Emergency figures.

A national four hour A&E target means 95 per cent of patients should be seen within four hours or admitted to a ward.

But a whistleblower from Worcestershire Acute Hospitals Trust said staff counted some patients as hitting the target by claiming they were being treated in a “virtual” ward - even though they were physically still in A&E.

The trust's own records show patients at Alexandra Hospital in Redditch were logged as being admitted to a ward called an "Emergency Decisions Unit" (EDU) even though they actually stayed in A&E. In other cases, the times that patients were logged as being moved were at odds with reality, the records showed.